Wes Craven was an American film director, writer, and producer known as the master of horror. Some of his most famous works include Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream. He enjoyed one of his biggest successes with Scream in 1996, which became a popular slasher film franchise. Throughout his career Craven explored themes of human cruelty and the battle between sanity and the unconscious mind through realistic yet intense horror situations.

1. Wes Craven
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2. Born on August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio,
Wes Craven went on to direct horror films
like Last House on the Left, The Hills Have
Eyes and Swamp Thing before helming the
infamous Nightmare on Elm Street. He
scored another major hit with Scream,
which spawned three sequels as of 2011.
Craven also directed the school
drama Music of the Heart and thriller Red
Eye, along with a number of TV projects.

3. Master of Horror
Craven made an impressive film debut in
1972's The Last House on the Left, which he
wrote and directed. The movie mined human
cruelty to fuel the horrific tale of teenage girls
abducted by deranged prisoners. The evil that
people can inflict on others provided the
central conflict for another now-classic Craven
film The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

4. In 1984, Craven gave audiences thrills and chills
with A Nightmare on Elm Street. The movie
featured Freddy Krueger, a supernatural killer
who attacked his victims in their dreams and
gave a young Johnny Depp one of his first film
roles. A Nightmare on Elm Street launched a
hugely successful film franchise, but Craven had
little to do with any of the sequels. He only
wrote the screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm
Street 3 (1987). In 1994, Craven returned to the
character of Freddy Krueger with New
Nightmare.

5. Craven tried his hand at directing a humor-
horror hybrid with 1995's Vampire in
Brooklyn starring Eddie Murphy and Angela
Bassett. But he enjoyed one of his biggest hits
the following year as the director of Scream, a
horror film that played with and made fun of
many of the genre's standard tropes and tricks.
Written by Kevin Williamson and starring Neve
Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette,
the movie brought in more than $100 million
and spawned several sequels.

6. • He also directed Red Eye (2005), a suspense
thriller about a young woman (Rachel
McAdams) who gets caught up in an
assassination plot, which proved to be another
departure from Craven's standard fare.
• Craven returned to the genre that made him
famous in 2010 with My Soul to Take, which he
wrote and directed. In an interview
with Variety, he described the movie as "a
coming-of-age horror film." The following year,
Craven returned to the
popular Scream franchise to direct its fourth
installment.

7. About the criticism of teen horror movies,
Craven says: "What threatens them or enrages
them or what makes them feel like they must
protect youth is intensity. So the more real
something is, the more intense it is, the more
they want to cut it out."

8. It seems that in a lot of his movies he
likes to present a battle of sanity and
battles between the conscious and
unconscious mind. He liked to focus on
main life events. His scenes very well
demonstrate cinematic style which
featured the insanity style to realist
situation. It creates empathy for the
character and makes us jump at the
end.